X-Morph: Defense to soon hit PS4

PlayStation on Tuesday announced that X-Morph: Defense is coming to the PlayStation 4 on August 30.

This game is a pretty unique blend of a twin-stick shooter and tower defense. You are the X-Morph – an alien that lands on Earth. You arrival is seen as a threat, and the conflict starts; humanity defending the planet by attacking you, and you defending yourself by destroying them.

The aliens land in many different places across the globe – South Africa, Australia, USA, Japan, Germany, the shores of the Caspian Sea. The X-Morph visits all continents (except Antarctica).

Chief Operating Officer EXOR Studios Pawel Lekki said production on X-Morph: Defense started right after they released Zombie Driver HD on the PS3 (which some of you might still remember).

Take over the world!

The X-Morph’s goal is to take over the entire planet by placing their harvester cores in key strategic locations. These structures transform Earth’s surface around them and drain energy straight from the planet. Landing sites are divided into primary and secondary areas.

You are rewarded with new upgrades and technologies after securing each harvester core. You can observe X-Morph influence affecting the globe after each successful mission. There’s a large variety in gameplay sceneries ranging from urban centers and industrial complexes to dense forests.

Destroy everything in your path

The destruction system in X-Morph: Defense lets you destroy practically everything.

It’s not just about collapsing bridges or tearing down buildings. Each single object can be destroyed and breaks up into small individual pieces. We’ve put extra effort into making the world respond to your actions. Every piece of debris that falls into the water creates a splash effect. The destruction algorithm is entirely physics based and buildings collapse depending on which of their parts are destroyed. You can shoot their top off, cut them down at the base or blow up the middle section. Dropping airplanes can destroy buildings revealing their interiors.

It took us quite a lot of work to model all of these fancy interiors, but we think it was well worth the effort. The same goes for bosses ramming buildings. When a massive Mecha slams into a skyscraper, it will collapse depending on the force of the attack.

Split screen co-op enhanced on the PS4 Pro

Fighting humans is much more fun with a friend. We wanted to give the co-op campaign a special feel, so we’ve taken extra care in rebalancing each enemy wave in each mission. We added new enemies and additional human attack formations to create a different take on the story campaign, said the CEO.

As you can imagine, two players wreaking havoc at the same time in split-screen, combined with even more enemy units, can put a lot of stress on a gaming system. We’ve put a lot of effort into optimizing our Schmetterling engine to handle all of that action. The game’s performance is additionally enhanced on the PlayStation 4 Pro to give you a solid 60 FPS in split screen co-op, even in the thickest of battles, he said.